Life of educated vs non educated women using Willy Russell's Educating Rita - Essay Example

of the of the Educating Rita Willy Russell’s “Educating Rita” is a play about a girl Rita who belongs to working class of the society. She is a married woman who believes that education is a key to her personal development and strives to study hard from her tutor, Frank. Rita was a married woman who yearned to break away from her class boundary and develop herself. For an uneducated woman during her time, life was a complete distress. Rita thought that without education the women belonging to her class would always remain confined to their homes as housewives.

The perfect example of the poor life was of her mother’s. During one part of the play she says, “…when I looked round me mother had stopped singin’, an’ she was cryin’…I said, ‘Why are y’ cryin’, Mother?’ She said, ‘because- because we could sing better songs than those.’…And that’s why I came back. And that’s why I’m staying.” (Russell) Rita thinks that ignorance has ripped freedom from the women like her mother. The uneducated did not have freedom of choice and they were forced to do what is demanded of them.

They could not live for themselves and since their vision and thinking was narrow they were easily pressurized into living the way others want them to live. Hence, according to the novel the life of the uneducated is miserable and without any freedom of choice. Rita was also an illiterate but she wanted to be different from the other uneducated women that surrounded her. This is the reason she studied literature from Frank as she believed that only education could lead her to personal discovery.

Education brought a lot of changes in Rita. It gave her confidence and the freedom to express. She felt independent and a void that was previously present in her life had been filled. After being educated, she believed that she could form opinions by herself without having to rely on anyone; education provided her with self-sufficiency. Even though Rita gained what she had desired, she lost her individuality in the personal development. The play emphasizes on this point that seeking education merely for the sake of intellectual development is not right.

Rita developed and separated herself from the working class but in the process she became pretentious and became more of an academic scholar like Frank than the enthusiastic girl she had previously been. Thus using Rita as an example, the play contrasts how the life of an uneducated differs from that of an educated woman. Previously Rita had been keen to elevate herself from the status of working class but when she had earned that status and considered herself happy, she seemed to have lost much of originality and liveliness from her character.

Hence it is important to note that it is the education that separates the working class form the upper class. And by getting education, one can improve the quality of life as it helps to enlarge one’s vision. Rita in “Educating Rita” serves as a perfect example to show the importance that education hold in our society. Works Cited Russell, Willy. Educating Rita. Methuen Drama (Modern Classics), 2001. Print.